Well... it was more of Intel coming along and saying... wouldn't it be nice if you retooled all your factories for us?... I am sure in their mind it made perfect sense... however I don't think anyone else saw profit in it for them.

What we really need is for Video Cards to start reigning in their power requirements,. It is ridiculous that you can have a nearly silent very high end system, but throw in a video card and the whole thing turns into a mini-cyclone... it makes makes up for all the noise and heat that the rest of the industry has worked on.

This whole ESA thing is just another gimmick that I don't want or need. I hope this thing fails so I don't have to pay for the additional expense of having it in the hardware I purchase. Reply

What exactly was the point of this article? Seriously! I about puked when I saw the "industry quotes" - taken, I might add, straight from the NVIDIA slides. That was some quality writing, I tell you what! I'm not at all surprised that Falcon, HP/Voodoo, Dell/Alienware, etc. think this is great, because that's just one more way for them to try and pretend their insanely priced "gamer systems" are worth purchasing.

I don't know that ESA is going to be a complete waste of time, but it looks more like another way to charge more money for "enthusiast" components. The stupid 1100W and higher power supplies are already making me sick. Do we really need three graphics cards? Oh, wait! There's a huge difference between 4xAA and 8xAA that we MUST HAVE!

FWIW the GPU fans that start out quiet and then spin up to insanely loud levels are not what I want for the rest of my system. I'm much more interested in a reasonble performing system that stays quiet than uber-monitored hardware that lets me know it's overheating. As if the fans spinning at 10000 RPM weren't a good indication of that already. Reply

You don't have to write for a website to find slides, or quotes. Like this material http://www.nvidia.com/object/io_1194260551610.html">direct from the NVIDIA press release. That takes care of the Dell and HP quotes. I have written nothing about ESA online, other than these comments. I have, however, seen a couple different PPT files on the subject. Most of those are no longer available, but it's amazing what turns up on the internet now and then. I think I even had a draft version of the ESA presentation before NVIDIA even held their Editor's Day! LOL

I appreciate that you were somewhat cautious in the conclusion, but that whole section on industry support and ESA problem solving just smacked of marketing rather than reporting. Numerous other sentences were ripped directly from the press release/marketing materials. If this were an English assignment, you'd be in serious jeopardy for plagiarism. Considering you write for a respected (mostly) publication, this might be even worse.

The truth is that we still know basically nothing about the actual ESA hardware and software. Will it rock my world or will it just add bloat and cost? I can tell you how many times I've used nTune (a couple tries initially, followed by a return to the BIOS as it was more useful). I doubt ESA software is going to be dramatically better. Different, sure, but probably not better.

I don't know why, but as I read all this the first thing that popped into my head is that a virus could interface to the ESA controls and shut down your fans, fiddle with the voltages, reset all the warning thresholds, and generally screw up your system at a hardware level. This is something that has generally been impossible thus far (despite the various hoaxes about some virus that will destroy your monitor, fry your mainboard, and kill your cat). Hopefully nVidia and friends are considering this possibility as they go forward with this excellent concept.
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Agreed, that would be utterly terrifying if a new Trojan came out that not only screwed up your files and locked you out of your system, but also overvolted all of your components and turned your fans down to 0%. Eeeek. Reply

Yes I think abit is the master of this kind of stuff.
uguru is the only thing I miss on my old system.

Even new asus boards dont support for advanced monitoring/tweaking abilities.

My main miss is the ability to overclock/underclock on the fly in windows. Ati tool already has a profile scheme where if it detects if a game is being launched it will switch to 3d profile; why does this not exist for CPU's and other components? Reply

There are two things that matter a lot when it comes to system monitoring/controlling software:

Bloat - How much does it impact system response/performance? How much system resources are taken up running the software?

Interface - Is it small and configurable, or ugly and large like most of this crap when it comes from the OEM instead of a 3rd party user? One thing you'll notice with tools like ATiTool and SpeedFan is that they are designed to be unobtrusive, configurable, and light (from a resources perspective).

Most OEM tools are giant GUIs with a few buttons surrounded by tons of whitespace or ugly, space-wasting colored graphics and pointless clutter that would appeal more to an eight-year-old than an adult. They also tend to be bloated, taking a long time to load and using a lot of system resources just to monitor the system, which is counterproductive.

So until we see how this system rates in those two areas, we don't really have the info we need to make a judgment call as to whether this move by NVidia is progress or regression. Reply

Given, Im no programmer, but couldn't the "bloat" issue be fixed with a couple different modes or something?

You have the full on mode that can render the 3d temperature, monitor all systems, etc. etc. And then when you get in game (surely you could configure the program to automatically notice once your system is being monopolized by an application that needs it and "tone down" to where it's only monitoring CPU/RAM use and a couple temperatures (CPU, GPU, HDD) like Logitech's G15 Programs. Hopefully you won't be overclocking or optimizing while playing crisis.

And a sleek UI isn't that hard to make. Get a graphic designer and a couple UI experts to do it, can't be too expensive. Make the buttons big and some color options and I'll have it running all the time.

I'm personally VERY excited about this. I'm an ATI fanboy but ideas like ESA, trying to unify PC enthusiast use (like, say game consoles) is always a good thing. And people may not care about high-end systems and say this is useless, but one of the fun things about this platform is squeezing as much as possible out of it. Let the games begin. Reply

I think it would be the first good move by the manufacturers. We can probably get rid of the excessive software bloat by the hardware manufacturers including software included by sound cards, video cards, and motherboards. I don't know about the hardware manufacturers giving up control of their hardware to software tweaks. Reply

I am sorry but this article read like the press release from nvidia this morning. If ESA is all that then why not show us the hardware and software working together today? It just appears to be one more way for nvidia to try to control the desktop. Before you start yelling about open platforms, no company goes through this trouble without expecting something in return. That is why it would be interesting to see how well it works on a nvidia designed board compared to one from asus or msi. If something looks like a fish, smells like a fish, then it usually is a fish and this one might also be full of mercury. We go from the great 8800GT release to this in one week. :( Reply

"One of the frustrations of technology launches, as opposed to actual hardware and software launches, is that no matter what you write it ends up sounding something like a commercial for the product. That is why all the writers at AnandTech much prefer the hard reality of testing a product at launch, where we can make comparisons."

However, ESA is a proposed new standard for communication and control more than a real product. We plann to evaluate an ESA enabled system with as many ESA components as possible as soon it is available. At this point the new ESA chipset itself is not even launched. Reply

I know this is off-topic, but off-hand I do not know of any other way to reach AT staff.

Most people in the Video forum were optimistic and open-minded about DirectX 10 and the performance/IQ claims made by Microsoft, yet most of the new games and demos introduced this year have a huge performance hit with little or no perceived IQ improvements. Hellgate London is the only game I've heard of where the performance benefits are said to be realized. Every other DX10 game/demo has been disappointing.

Unfortunately, every game seems to have different sets of issues related to DX10, leading to a variety of conflicting theories with no solid evidence.

It would be great if Anandtech published a realistic DX10 article describing the cause of the performance hit and highlighting any IQ improvements in upcoming/shipping games. Reply

The return for nVidia is:
1. Prestige.
2. Major influence on a new standard.

It's hard to write negative things about new standards, generally because they're invented to solve problems. Criticizing them for not having the software/hardware stack completely lined-up and out the door is ludicrous - these things take time. Would you prefer to be completely blind-sided by a new stack of things you've never heard of before coming out tomorrow?

Have you ever been involved with formulating a new standard for anything? There's nothing unusual going on here. Reply

I do care if the interface is easy to use and the program is written and supported accurately enough that it won't make my system unstable.

We all have different systems, drivers, software, and Os's. If they still struggle to uniform games to work stable enough on all our systems, then I have major worries about programs that intend to plug-in and control such vital operations such as cooling, voltage control, and others. Reply

"open" can mean anything these days -- just look at Microsofts "OpenXML": it's the
usual binary dump of their office formats with XML tags wrapped around (and the name
is pure marketing genius: combine two of the most recognizable buzzwords in the IT
industry and voila!)
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Indeed. PCI is an "open standard" yet you have to pay four figures to (legally) get a copy of it. Not to mention that there are many other "open standards" that have licencing fees.

Given that NVidia only have a "contact us" link for getting hold of it, and given NVidia's history of secrecy, I wouldn't be at all surprised if one or both of these situations applied here. I've fired off an email but I'm not holding my breath ... Reply